Big Picture Budgeting: What should you be focusing on in your dental practice? (Part 2)
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Transcript
Jonathan VanHorn:
Hey everybody, Jonathan checking in here and just so you know, this is a two part episode. This is the second part of the episode. So if you've not listened to the first part yet, you want to go back and listen to it in the prior weeks. We should have it labeled on the episode title what part one is and part two is, so you should be able to see that in the title of the episode, what episode of episode it is. So thanks.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones. Some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand. Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into Facebook group, as well as add you to the list to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. So onto today's episode, I hope you enjoy it.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So let's say that you did all these things, and you can come in, and you can influence these numbers, you've done an amazing job. If you've been able to influence all the expenses and lower them by five to 10%, not five to 10% overall, but five to 10% of the 55%, which would mean that you've moved from 55 cents of every dollar down to maybe two and a half to five pennies extra that you're going to get out of every dollar. And I know of practice owners that spend tens of hours a month trying to do this and trying to reduce these expenses because they want to spend less, so they get to keep more of every dollar that comes in. But to me, that's missing the picture. That's missing the bigger picture because instead of trying to save that five to 10 cents, why not just over on the other side of that table, pour out 100 more pennies in which you could then move 55 cents of those over and keep the 45 cents.
Jonathan VanHorn:
You could find so many more dollars to dump on that table, if you just worked on increasing capacity, and doing a better job of having patients in, and generating more revenue. That is, in the dental industry, the way the math works, that's so much more of a higher value for the use of your time than going through and making sure every month that I know exactly how much I spent on every glove that came in this office, I know where every one of those nickels went to. The amount of time that, that will take you, and energy, and focus, and effort could be so much better spent on your office to do so much more. And so that's overall why I say budgeting sucks. It's a waste of time because you really only should have to manage your expenses once a year maybe.
Jonathan VanHorn:
I think that's a better term for it and I think those two terms get conflated inside of a lot of industries. Small business, you don't need to worry about budgeting. The way I explain this to some people is that, I've had clients that have had budgets in the past, and they're like, "Jonathan, we budgeted 10% of our revenue to go to labs and our labs got all the way up to 10% so fast that I told people that I didn't want to take any more big cases because I don't want to do more labs." And I said, "Look, that's completely defeating the purpose."
Joseph Rugger:
[crosstalk 00:04:52] What's the point?
Jonathan VanHorn:
That's not... I felt like the woman from that commercial that's like, "This isn't how this works. This is how none of this works." She's trying to explain to her friend how Facebook works and she's putting pictures up on the wall. The way I explain it is, if someone said, "Hey," let's say that an ortho case is worth $5,000 to your office, if someone said, "Hey, I will give you 1,000 ortho cases. That's like $5 million in ortho cases, but I'm going to charge you $3,000.00 per case," and assume there was no other expenses. That's 60% going to labs, that's way over your budget. Would you take that deal? Assuming everything else is the same.
Joseph Rugger:
Of course you would.
Jonathan VanHorn:
The obvious answer is probably going to be, "Yeah, I want $2 million," $2 million is fine, but it completely destroys your budget, so that's the reason that the math just doesn't work out in a lot of these smaller practices. Now, the argument is definitely made that when you get larger, when you get to maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, $10 million a year in revenue that if you can save five to 10%, if you can say that five pennies per dollar coming in, in a $10 million office, that's $50,000.00 a year. That's pretty nice, right? Sorry, it's $500,000.00. Is that? Yeah, $500,000.00 a year. That's $500,000.00 a year. That's a lot of money. That's called economy of scales. The larger you get, the more value it brings. And so that's my big argument against budgeting. The last thing that I'll say that is a really important number to keep up with in terms of doing expense management is your credit card processing fees and your insurance reimbursements.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So credit card processing fees are, I was telling you, Joseph, before we got on the call, we had a client that they were spending something like $30,000.00 a year in credit card fees and they were paying about 3% as an effective rate. The effective rate most people can get to is about 2% and we've hooked them up with a great credit card vendor and they literally are saving $10,000.00 a year by just changing the phone number that, that credit card machine dialed to. And so that was an easy one, so that's why I'm saying you got to make sure that you're keeping up with your expenses and you do need to look at them, but the frequency doesn't have to be every month, every day, every hour, every minute. It can be in bigger pictures and just make sure that you're getting decent deals along the way. Yeah, that's kind of my philosophy and my thoughts on budgeting. What were some of the things that you're thinking about?
Joseph Rugger:
Well, I always go back to the cost benefit ratio, and as a business owner, is it worth your time, energy, and effort because you don't have an army of financial analysts and accountants inside of your practice to do this. Is it really the best use of your time to do that? And I think the things that you're talking about outside of budgeting, so budgeting, if we use the diminishing returns and then we flip that and say, "What are we going to get exponential returns?" So if we say the lifetime value of one patient is, pick a general number, right? $10,000.00, if we spend time to get an additional one patient, 10 patients, 20 patients, whatever it is, we're talking about exponential returns versus diminishing returns on those kinds of things.
Joseph Rugger:
And that's something, as we work with new practice owners, they're really, really concerned about get the P&L, and I'm like, "Doc, your top line is zero, I can hand you your expenses, but really where we need to do all of our energy and efforts is on this top line revenue, and get patients in the door, and that kind of thing." I mean, because that's where you're going to have the exponential returns.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah. And like you said, a lot of it also depends on the goals of the practice. If you're okay with where you are in the world and you're like, "Yeah, we got enough revenue. My service mix is perfect. I never want to increase capacity. I never want to change the amount of crowns I'm doing for a patient. I never want to change, add services," or whatever it may be and you've never done this before, you should do it. Do it once and then if you want to do it every month, do it, but I would challenge you to say that you're probably going to be wasting your time majority of the time you're doing it, other than that first time. I mean, I've literally given a checklist of things that people could do today to optimize expenses and like 99% of you guys that are out there, I guarantee you that's going to be enough.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So anyway, that's my thoughts on budgeting and things like that. Now, I will say, budgeting is not the same thing as optimizing your cash. It's not the overall thing. It's not a substitute for understanding your cashflow because we've personally seen clients that have had positive results from having intention around and an understanding and monitoring of where their money is going to. And this is on bigger picture things, right? It's not specifically on, well, I got to make sure that I'm only spending 7% of my revenue on supplies this month or else I've done a bad thing. It's more about making sure that the cash flow is staying where it's supposed to be. Right? You work with a lot of clients on this and you do this in your CFO role, so explain a little bit more about that.
Joseph Rugger:
Well, I think going back to something that we talked about on that personal budgeting is about having intentionality. So the bulk of our clients are small businesses that are what they call flow-through entities, right? So basically all of the income from the practice flows through to their personal tax return and they're required to make estimated tax payments. So one of the things that I think makes a whole, whole lot of sense is to make sure that we're preparing for what we're going to have to pay out in income taxes. So one of the things that I've recommended time and time again to practice owners is, "Hey, let's just open a separate bank account and let's just start saving money for taxes. You're going to have quarterly taxes. They're going to be due at this point in time. We don't know exactly how much those are going to be. We're going to throw some estimates and some projections together and see what it's going to be, but would you rather have that money come out of your practice checking account or would you rather have already saved and been intentional about setting aside some money?"
Joseph Rugger:
And it may be something where you set aside $5,000.00 a month, or $10,000.00 a month, or check with your tax professional on how much the estimated tax payments are going to be, but setting money aside for income taxes that you're going to have to make at either the state level and the federal level, or just at the federal level, if you don't have state income tax, but saving for taxes, having some money that you set aside and you're intentional about putting that aside. I've got another client that really wants to do some capital expenditures he doesn't want to have any more debt to the practice. He doesn't want to take out notes. He'd rather just save up and pay cash.
Joseph Rugger:
I'm like, "Okay, well maybe we should open up a bank account and send a percentage of your revenue over to this and it'd be a capital expenditure account," and we start saving a few thousand dollars a month here and there, and all of a sudden we've got enough money set aside that he can pay cash for those things rather than having to finance. And then there's certainly your pros and cons to financing capital equipment and that kind of thing, but this specific client his kind of capacity on whether or not he wanted to use debt to do it, he just said, "I don't want to take out any more debt." So let's save for it, let's be intentional about it.
Joseph Rugger:
There's lots of different people that are out there that have written quite a bit on all the different ways to handle money inside of a business. Kind of one of the things that I continue to hear and will be a good concept to all of our listeners here is the idea of paying yourself first. So whether that's David Bach telling you to sign up for your company 401k and have money withheld, to the Mike Michalowicz's of the world that say take your profit first, or kind of the Dave Ramsey's that say have an envelope system and save specific amounts for specific things. Everybody in that whole world is like, so let's be intentional about it. So really what we're talking about is rather than it be like a budget, it's just about being intentional with your cashflow. Are you looking at how much cash, extra cash that your practice has produced this month?
Joseph Rugger:
Okay, we had an additional... Our cash went up in the bank, $10,000.00. Well, what are you going to do with it? You going to take a shareholder distribution? You going to pay off loans? You going to invest that money? Are you going to save up for something else? What are you going to do? So one of the things that we've done with some of our clients is having these cashflow budgeting conversations and I hate to use the word budget in it because that's really not what it is, it's really just a cash management system. It's a way to be intentional about as money comes into the practice, where does it go?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah, and that's one of the things that is really, even myself, someone who's a CPA and works with financials, and dollars, and cents every day, being a business owner the numbers we just explained to people, the 45 cents of every dollar that comes in, some months that's 30 cents out of every dollar, some months that's 60 cents out of every dollar, some months... It's very, very, very, very rarely that it's every month is exactly 45 cents gets put into your coffers and then you get to do with whatever it is, do whatever you want with it. Sometimes these one time expenses do come up. So of the 45 cents that you set aside to the profit, you might need to allocate five cents of that to go into these rainy day funds, or maybe you've got some big goals in the future and you know that you're going to have to staff up soon or hire an associate soon and you need to get more cash available.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So maybe we just set aside another five cents for an additional capacity expanding fund, or maybe it's, "Hey, I know I'm going to have a bunch of taxes at the end of the year because I remember Tooth & Coin and them telling me that I'm going to owe. It's August and I think I'm going to owe $50,000.00 come tax time, maybe I should be setting aside some of this money to be able to get $50,000.00 saved up." Intentionality and having a plan for cashflow is very different than budgeting to me, and that's pretty much every CPA firm, if you go to a CPA firm or to a CPA and say, "Hey, can you help me budget?" They're going to do what we talked about in the first part of this conversation. They're going to be like, "Yeah, okay, let's do a forecast. Let's talk about how much revenue you did last year. Let's talk about your expenses last year and we're going to add 5% to this, and 3% to that, and 2% to this, and what are your growths are going to be?" And all these other things.
Jonathan VanHorn:
They're going to come up with this math formula to be able to keep up with things, but it's very different than what we're talking about now and being intentional with your cashflow. So like you said, profit first system, the pay yourself first, the automatic millionaire idea, the richest man in Babylon, there's tons of different budgeting things that you can do, or not budgeting things, but cashflow optimization and intentional ideas that came about in the past, but to me, it all starts with you have to understand that there's variability in what your income is going to be as a business owner and you have to do your best to understand that variability in terms of the cash that's leftover, which is again, this is a unique problem for a lot of businesses in dentistry, there's typically a good amount of cashflow left over, in a lot of businesses, there's almost no cashflow.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And in the dental world, when that fluctuates, sometimes it can fluctuate to big numbers. Like last year, we had people that got hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funds.
Joseph Rugger:
Sitting in the checking account. [crosstalk 00:16:25].
Jonathan VanHorn:
Exactly, just coming in and they're like, "Well, hey, it's here. I don't really know what to do with it now. Do I take it out? Do I use it? Do I save it? Do I invest it? Do I pay it to my employees? What do I do with it?" It's being intentional with the money, having a plan for it, and just so everyone knows, Joseph is the person who does this in our firm. He helps our clients do this, and come up with plans for this, and find ways to save the money better. And what are some of the lessons that you've learned when it comes to the dental field specifically about coming up with a plan and then following through with it?
Joseph Rugger:
I think a couple of things kind of resonate with me. One of the things that, I don't know that we talked extensively about it in our personal budgeting, but is lifestyle creep where as more money comes in, magically it just all of a sudden disappears because all of a sudden we've bought new stuff at the office or we've hired new people. So where we may have had free cashflow that was at a certain level before, all of a sudden it's starting to dwindle as far as how much free cashflow it is. And it's not lifestyle creep, I guess you could call it practice scope creep as you have bought nicer stuff and all of those kinds of things, and you are used to taking out that $10,000.00 distribution, or $20,000.00, or $5,000.00, or whatever it is, so you just kind of automatically take that out.
Joseph Rugger:
All of a sudden the practice has a couple of bad months in a row, and all of a sudden you're looking and you don't have enough cash to pay the bills, and you've got to scramble a little bit. So if you're not taking those variables... As you mentioned, there's just so much variability in this business, as you were making those different decisions, what's it based on? Gut feeling? Like, "Oh, well, if I've got 75k in the practice checking account, that's enough. I'm going to take anything out on top of that." Well, what if your credit card bill with American Express this month is $30,000.00 because you had some big cases, added some new equipment? All that stuff like that $75,000.00, if you have a $30,000.00 outstanding credit card bill, that's not the same as if you don't have an outstanding credit card bill that's coming due in a couple of days and you've got $75,000.00.
Joseph Rugger:
That's one thing that I've noticed is that kind of we get into some habits and the habits are based on something other than the actual cashflow of the business, whether that's the lifestyle creep, or whether that's the practice scope creep, or if that's just getting used to, oh, I just take out the same amount of money, because that's what I need to pull out of the practice each month. What if you have a month where you totally blow it out of the water and your collections are typically 80k and all of a sudden it's 150k? Do you still take the same amount out? Well, I would say, no. We need to figure out what's going on and have a plan for that. And again, intentionality continues to be kind of a theme that we talk about on our podcast here. We want you to be intentional about pulling money out. "Where did you get that number?" "Oh, I just made it up. I just had a gut feeling." Well, that's not a plan. That's not going to get you from where you're at to where you want to be. We want you to be intentional.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah, and the other thing that comes up with that variability and the intentionality is that if you figure out three months later that you didn't have enough cash at the time, it's already too late most of the time. I mean, you're in trouble at that point. And so if we're thinking about those percentages we talked about and if you're out there, feel free to use that as your own set up. I'm going to dedicate 15 cents of every dollar to occupancy and other stuff, 25 cents out of every dollar to staff, 15 cents out of every dollar to the supplies and labs, and the other 45 cents of every dollar I'm going to have, let's say, five cents. Again, this is completely dependent on your situation, your goals, and what it is you're trying to do in your business.
Jonathan VanHorn:
But let's just say for discussion purposes, I'm putting 10 cents of the 45 cents of profit into some type of an investment fund that I'm going to use for the business and investing in the business. And then the other 35 cents, I'm going to pull out whether it be through salaries, wages, payroll taxes, my retirement plan, or distributions, or discretionary expenses that I have inside of the business that is being paid for on my behalf, whether it be travel, or continuing ed, or renting our home, for other reasons like that, that's what that money will be used for. What happens or I've seen happen is that, well, this month we had a pipe bust and we've got a $10,000.00 expense now, all of a sudden, that's going to go into this 10 to 15 cent thing, but there's not 10 or... That one thing costs more than that 10 or 15 cents that's leftover.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Well, most the time with the variability inside dentistry, a lot of people don't really think about that $10,000.00. Say it's $10,000.00, they pay the expense begrudgingly, little things like that come up throughout the month, every month, but a big thing like that comes up every once in a while and it kind of throws everything out of whack because well, all of a sudden that's a big percentage of this, and a big percentage of that, and it just doesn't work. So what is a way, Joseph, you help people with keeping up with this in an automatic fashion or in a more standardized process to where this type of information can be relayed faster?
Joseph Rugger:
Well, I think that you can always set percentages. So you mentioned percentages and there's lots of people out there that... I've seen a number of our clients that have opened up multiple bank accounts and that kind of thing. We've done that for a bunch of clients and that's been really successful like, "Okay, so out of every dollar that comes in the practice, we're going to set 10% aside and that's going to be your profit, and we're going to pull that money out of the business. It's going to be a distribution and you're going to live on the remaining 90%. You're going to operate your practice in that way." It's one of those things, it's difficult to make something like that automatic because it's going to be based on a percentage. So up months, down months, we're still using that same, let's just say for example, 10%, or maybe it's 15%, or maybe it's 5%.
Joseph Rugger:
If we say, "Let's have supplies and labs be its own account." Okay. Well, 15 cents out of every dollar or 15% is going to go to that supplies and labs account. And what that does is that allows you to do bank balance accounting, as simple as that is. So oftentimes what we figured out over the years is that people have a hard time just looking at a profit and loss, or looking at a balance sheet, or looking at a cashflow statement and marrying all that together and understanding. They may say, "Well, I show a profit on my P&L, but I'm out of cash." "Well, that's because you made $30,000.00 principle payment on your loan." "Oh, I didn't think about that. Oh yeah, now I remember that."
Joseph Rugger:
Or, "Hey, I've got all this extra cash in my account." "Well, that's because you took out an EIDL loan from SBA, so you got $50,000.00." It's all of these different things that come through, so being intentional, and setting percentages, and going along those lines, we found that to be really, really successful. We have some clients that kind of do that themselves and make those kind of things. We've got some that we help out with that process, and see what it looks like, and kind of help them manage that, and make cashflow decisions. And basically, as money comes in... What money comes in is what we need to be spending money on, not just some arbitrary number, not something that's not intentional. So I think it's been successful for the ones that we've helped. Just kind of really just add transparency, I think that's a word that I've heard several clients, "This really helps me understand kind of in a transparent way how my business is doing."
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah, helps you understand where those dollars are going. I mean, what better incentive do you have to look at your spending habits than to realize, hey, there's not enough money in here to pay for this thing? And in dentistry, I find that usually it's pretty easy and... Well, it's not easy to pay for things. The money is technically there in the bank account, but you don't know if that money is available for specifically that thing, or if you're robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay for that thing. And if you're intentional about your dollars, that should come out as a big red flag. So you mentioned like the envelope system as a method, is a lot of what it is, so envelope system, profit first system, they're all kind of the same, but what about frequency? How often do you recommend people be looking at this type of a thing?
Joseph Rugger:
Yeah, so I think that you've got to be looking at your monthly financials for sure. The folks that we're helping out with kind of this cashflow system, we're looking at it twice a month typically. I've got a couple of clients that want to make sure that we're allocating money appropriately for payroll costs, so we may look at that if they pay every other Friday, we may look at that every two weeks versus just twice a month. So it's basically like it's twice a month, except for the two months in the year that have three payroll Fridays, so we're looking at that. And then I think it's important to on a quarterly basis sit back and say, "Okay, how much cash has the business generated?"
Joseph Rugger:
Okay, well, we've got an excess balance of X. Okay, well, what are we going to do with that? Are we going to do one of the four things that we can do with money? Are we going to spend it? Are we going to give it? Are we going to save it? Or are we going to pay down debt with it? And having those conversations, I think, quarterly make a whole lot of sense and then kind of reviewing this stuff on a quarterly basis, I think makes a whole lot of sense. And on an annual basis, obviously everybody's going to be concerned about the annual basis because they've got taxes to pay and you kind of get stuck in this catch 22, where you want your business to look really good, but you don't want to pay very much in taxes, so looking at stuff on an annual basis.
Joseph Rugger:
I had a client that we'd helped out with this cashflow system and he said, "How am I doing?" And I said, "Well, how do you think you're doing?" He said, "Well, I think I'm doing well. I've been pulling X amount of salary in, and we're doing this system where we're taking the profits out of the business, and I'm distributing X amount of dollars." He said, "But I got my tax return the other day and it showed that we had a net operating loss." And I'm like, "Well, how's your cash balance been?" He's like, "Really good." I'm like, "Okay, well, there's a whole lot of complexities that go along with your tax situation that may not necessarily reflect how the cash flows throughout the business." And it may be one of things where we took some accelerated depreciation or something along those lines for some stuff that he had borrowed the money on to do some equipment, that kind of thing, but definitely monthly.
Joseph Rugger:
And then I think looking at stuff twice a month makes the most sense as well, quarterly for sure, and then annually, just to see how you're doing, look at your goals. What are your goals? Was your goal to do $1.2 million in collections this year? Was your goal to make $400,000.00 take home this year? What was your goal? And then how do we look? If we're looking at it quarterly, and your goal is to make $400,000.00 and you've made $20,000.00 in Q1, maybe we should reevaluate the goal. Maybe we should see what kept us from getting there.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and this is what I do personally in our business, in Tooth and Coin, is every... I do it every week just because for me it's simple to do. I go in and I know we don't have as many different expense categories as a dental practice does, we have what I call operating expenses, and then we have staff, and then we have profit basically after that. And our operating expenses, I don't go far down talk about the rent for the office space, or for our computers that we buy for people, or all the software that we use, and all the money that we use. It's all a part of the same thing, I just lump it into one big percentage.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And then I take the staff percentage, which is another percentage. And then I take a percentage for profit and take a percentage for taxes. And every week I just put those in those bank accounts and then I move it from our operating accounts into an interest bearing accounts for the ones that I'm not going to touch for a while. And then if I need those numbers back, I just pull them back. And the power in that is, is if you are facing a payroll run and you don't have enough payroll in there, well, something's happened in terms of your goals. Something's happened in terms of what happened with the cashflow and that means you're forced to physically move that money, which means you're forced at that point to look at it. Did something go wrong? Did we miscalculate something? Are my hours for my employees off? Is my revenue too low? Is the reason the revenue is too low because we're not doing a good job of... Why is that?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Oh, we have a revenue problem. Oh, we need to be doing a better job of scheduling. And all of a sudden, you're starting to work on these things in your business that are going to start optimizing themselves because you're forced to look at them. And so I love that process and I love the way that it works inside of every business, not just dental practices and things like that. So budgeting sucks, cashflow optimizing is awesome, having a plan for intentionality, for where things go. There's a lot more things we could talk about in terms of this, such as who are the best candidates for this? When should you be doing this in terms of your practice's age? How do you factor in growth? How do you do all these other things? And those things are going to start getting very, very personal in nature and I'm afraid that we're going to miss too many of those people and create generalities where it's actually very specific.
Jonathan VanHorn:
There's a lot of specifics on who should and shouldn't be doing these different times of their lives, and things like that, and nuances, and things like that. So for those things, I would say that you probably need to reach out to someone like ourselves or someone else who helps with these types of things in order to be able to have this type of help, because we're getting into really big specifics of being specific to your situation. So outside of that, Joseph, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about in terms of these things or anything that we didn't mention about the pitfalls of budgeting, diminishing returns, and then the benefits and boons of doing cashflow optimization, and being intentional with your money?
Joseph Rugger:
Yeah, no, I think we hit most of them. I think we want you to be intentional with your money. I think that one of the things that I'm always constantly looking at is, am I trying to get a mosquito with a sledgehammer? And if you're going to go out and spend 30 hours a year on budgeting and your top line's $300,000.00, that's hitting a mosquito with a sledgehammer. So keep the cost benefit ratio in mind and certainly it's good to be intentional. It's good to pay attention, but make sure that you're focusing your time on things that are going to give you the most return.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So yeah, so if you have any other questions or anything like that, feel free to look us up in the Facebook group or make a comment. Talk to us about it. We're happy to talk about this. I think this is the most fun thing about helping small businesses is this kind of stuff. I wish that there was more time in the day to be able to do these types of things. This is not what you're typically going to get in a relationship with a CPA firm. This is not technically in the standard terms of engagement with the CPA firm, which you're normally going to be getting. So these are things that you're going to have to ask additional help for from 99.9% of CPA firms or even just consultants when it comes to this kind of stuff. So just want to put that out there because sometimes we have clients come in, they have an expectation that this is just a part of accounting. This is not an accounting function. It's so far removed from accounting. This is definitely more consulting in nature and it's very specialized.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So anyway, so thanks again for listening guys and girls, we will see you next time on the Tooth and Coin Podcast. Thanks for joining in. Make sure to subscribe, iTunes, do all those things, like it whenever you see it, and we will see you guys next time. Thanks, Joseph.
Joseph Rugger:
Bye guys.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Bye.
Jonathan VanHorn:
That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin Podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country. I would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty and we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And if you enjoyed today's episode again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444, that's toothandcoin, no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444, apply with your email address. We'll send you the instructions on the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available, and we will see you next week.
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